Insights

Facebook for Estate Agents

Why UK Estate Agents Should Take Facebook Seriously as a Marketing Channel

Facebook has the single largest concentration of consumers of any social media platform: 82% of internet users in the UK are on Facebook. There are just over 31 million Facebook users in the UK, of which 24 million are ‘daily active users’. The largest demographic remains 25-34 year olds, with just under 26% of all users falling into this age bracket in the UK. 29% of users in the UK are aged 35-54

Facebook has an enormous amount of data about its users which marketers can use for (aggregated) targeting, enabling us to deliver highly relevant content to interested audiences. Facebook dwarfs Twitter and Google+ and LinkedIn; it is maturing and has become mainstream, now with an older demographic, with real buying power, having shed some of its early adopter teen users.

If you look ‘under the bonnet’, Facebook has a host of sophisticated marketing tools ideally suited to estate agents and property firms wanting to target specific audience segments with specific marketing aims. But the key is to understand what it is capable of doing …and formulating a strategy to achieve it and a budget.

Facebook Maths – what they don’t tell you

Typically, only about 16% of a Page’s ‘fans’ (ie those that have ‘Liked’ your Page) will see any single Post (same as with a personal profile, not many people realise this!). But there are ways to ensure a Post goes to all of a Page’s fanbase. And even to push it out to all the fans’ friends. If you have 1,000 Likes on your page, you may only reach 160 people at a time. But if each one has an average of 100 friends, and we’ve configured Posts to reach friends of fans, then you can reach 100,000 people with a social endorsement. If you’re not aware of how to do this, then you will continue to reach only about 160! Equating to 99,840 missed opportunities! Whilst Facebook charges for this, you can configure it so you only pay on results, not ‘views’, and you set your own budget. Results depend on your objectives, e.g clicks to website, Like your page, click to a sub-page, etc.

Furthermore, if viewers of your Posts interact with it, their social networks are informed of eg ‘Mark Likes XXXX’, achieving even further reach.

With Facebook we can see detailed performance reports for each Post and about your community of fans. So you can learn a great deal about your market and what they respond to.

Here are some awesome things you can achieve with Facebook…

promote a new property development

raise the profile of an estate agent with local home owners and associate the agent with successful sales

use Facebook to …increase the number of valuations for prospective buyers

promote specific properties to people with particular interests and demographics

raise the profile of properties for sale to curious locals (and thereby raising the profile of the agent to future prospective sellers)